Standing in the crowded compartment the next morning, Juliette felt the canvas bag she was wearing over her shoulder digging into her, just between her ribs and her left hip. The books with their sharp corners were trying to get inside her, she said to herself, each jostling to be the first; captive little creatures which, this morning, were almost hostile.
She knew why. On returning home the previous day, she’d phoned the agency to say she didn’t feel well—no, no, nothing serious, must be something she’d eaten, she’d be fine after a day’s rest—and had stuffed the books unceremoniously into a big shopping bag and zipped it shut, then plonked the bag by the front door, with her umbrella on top of it because rain had been forecast. Then she’d switched on the TV, turned up the volume, and eaten frozen lasagne heated up in the microwave while she watched a documentary on gannets, then another about a has-been rock star. She needed the noises of the world as a buffer between her and the book depot, between her and the time she’d just spent in that tiny room—no, not tiny but cramped, that office where the remaining empty space seemed to have been carved out from the inside by each book arranged on a shelf or stacked between the legs of a table, against an armchair or on the shelves of an old refrigerator with its door open.
What she had brought back from that room, she’d removed from her sight, from her senses, if not from her memory; her mouth full of the almost sweet taste of industrial lasagne, her eardrums ringing with music, exclamations, birdcalls, secrets, analyses, chatter, she regained her footing in the familiar, the everyday, the not-too-bad, the almost bearable—in other words, life—the only life she knew.
And now, the books seemed to bear her a grudge for having ignored them. That was nonsense.
“Hey,” complained the man next to her, a short, pudgy man in a camouflage parka, “your bag’s rock hard. What the hell have you got in there?”
Looking at the top of his shiny, balding head, she replied automatically: “Books.”
“At your age? I don’t believe it. Not that I’m against books, but you’d do better to—”
Juliette didn’t hear the rest of his sentence because the train shuddered to a halt, the doors opened, and the belligerent man, swept along by the tide of bodies, was already out of sight. A tall, slim woman with a creased raincoat took his place. She did not complain, even though for the entire duration of the journey she bounced against the books, which seemed to have arranged themselves to stab her as hard as possible at the slightest contact. Juliette felt bad for her and pressed herself against the juddering partition, but the woman’s face, which she glimpsed in profile, did not betray the slightest annoyance; only a heavy weariness, like a thick shell, encrusted and hardened by time.
At last, she reached her station, wove her way through the stream of commuters going up and down the stairs, stumbled as she stepped onto the pavement, made a beeline for the agency, the sea of property ads—white rectangles with a bright orange border—and ran to the door.
She was the first in, so she was able to dump the bag under her jacket in the metal cupboard where the staff kept their personal belongings. Then she slammed the door with needless force and sat down at her desk, where a pile of incomplete files was waiting for her, plus a Post-it note covered in Chloe’s untidy scrawl:
U feeling better? Doing a viewing now, then on to that awful flat in Rue G. XXX!
“That awful flat in Rue G” meant a very, very long viewing. The fifty-square-meter apartment was almost entirely taken up by a passageway and a disproportionately spacious bathroom containing a claw-foot bathtub eaten away by rust. Chloe had made this her personal challenge. A few days earlier, Juliette had listened to her drawing up her battle plan, enumerating enthusiastically the benefits of such a bathtub bang in the middle of Paris.
“If it’s a couple, it’ll enhance their sex life. They simply have to imagine themselves in it, with loads of foam and perfumed oil for foot massages.”
“What about the rust, and the cracked linoleum? I don’t find that very glamorous,” Juliette had objected.
“I’m going to take my grandmother’s antique Chinese rug over there—it’s in the basement, my mother won’t even notice it’s gone—and a potted plant. They’ll think they’re in a conservatory, you see, like in that book you lent me. It’s a pain, and it’s very long—I couldn’t get to the end of it—but there was that cool thing, full of flowers, with wicker chairs…”
Yes, Juliette knew exactly what she meant. The book was Zola’s The Kill, which Chloe had returned to her, saying: “They make so much fuss about nothing!” But she had apparently enjoyed the seduction scene in the conservatory, when Renée Saccard gives herself to her young stepson amid the heady fragrances of the rare blooms, boasting of her husband’s fortune and good taste.
“You should have come to the home-staging training event,” Chloe chastised her. “It was amazing. You’ve got to put life into the properties—the life people crave. You want them to say, as they walk in, ‘If I live here, I’ll be stronger, more successful, more popular. I’ll get that promotion I’ve been after for two years and that I haven’t dared ask for because I’m scared of having the door slammed in my face. I’ll earn five hundred euros a month more. I’ll ask out that girl in the advertising department and she’ll say yes.’”
“You’re selling them an illusion…”
“No, a dream. And I help them imagine themselves in a better future,” concluded Chloe solemnly.
The phone rang. It was Chloe: “Bring me a book. You’ve got loads in your desk drawer. I’ve seen them,” she said accusingly.
“What kind of book?” asked Juliette, slightly disconcerted. “And why do—?”
“Any book. It’s for the little table I’m going to put next to the bathtub. It’ll hide the rust. I’m also going to put a vintage lamp with a bead fringe on it. Apparently, some girls love reading in the bath. You immediately feel the ambience.”
“I thought you wanted to suggest erotic games in the bath?”
“Her guy isn’t always there. And anyway, it’s good to chill occasionally.”
“If you say so,” replied Juliette, amused. Chloe was into one-night stands, bemoaned every weekend spent without a lover as if it were a tragedy, and would certainly never have thought of inviting Proust or Faulkner to join her in a bubble bath.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said before hanging up.
Chloe had been right: Juliette’s bottom desk drawer, the deepest, which made it impractical for keeping files in order, was stuffed with paperbacks, the vestiges of four years of commuting, books between whose pages she had slipped bookmarks—cinema tickets or dry-cleaning receipts, a pizzeria flyer, concert programs, or pages torn from a notebook on which she’d scribbled shopping lists or telephone numbers.
When she yanked the metal handle, the heavy drawer slid along its runners with a grating sound then jammed, and half a dozen books tumbled to the floor. Juliette retrieved them and sat up to place them next to her keyboard. No point rummaging through the drawer; the first title that came to hand would do.
“Title” being the key word here, as that was all Chloe would read.
The title. Yes, it was important. Would people read Lorette Nobécourt’s novel about psoriasis, The Itching, in the bath? Her skin still remembered that book: just holding it caused a furtive prickling, starting from her left shoulder blade and making its way up to her neck, and there she was scratching, even clawing herself. No, that wasn’t a good idea. And yet, once she’d started reading it, she couldn’t put it down. But then the bathwater was likely to go cold. What was needed was gentleness, something comforting, enveloping. And mysterious. Short stories? Maupassant’s “The Horla,” the unfinished journal of a descent into madness leading to suicide? Juliette pictured the reader, up to her neck in foam, looking up, gazing anxiously through the half-open door into the dark passage … From the shadows, her childhood ghosts and fears so carefully repressed over the years would appear with their attendant anxieties … The young woman would sit up, panic-stricken, clamber out of the bath, skid on the soap like Lady Cora Crawley in Downton Abbey, possibly breaking her neck as she fell …
No.
She also discarded with regret the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, several thrillers with tattered covers, an essay on work-related suffering, a biography of Stalin (why had she bought that?), a French–Spanish conversation handbook, two fat Russian novels in ten-point, single-spaced type (unreadable), and sighed. Selecting the right book wasn’t so straightforward after all.
She’d have to empty the drawer. There was bound to be something suitable in there. An inoffensive book, incapable of triggering even the slightest disaster.
Unless …
With the palm of her hand, Juliette swept the books haphazardly into the tomblike drawer, then closed it. It was sad, she could feel it, but for now she didn’t want to dwell on this vague and unpleasant emotion.
She had a mission to carry out.
She stood up, walked around the desk, and opened the cupboard.
The bag was still there. Why had she fleetingly thought it might have vanished? She leaned over, picked it up, and instinctively hugged it to her.
The corner of a book poked her between the ribs.
This is the one, she thought, with a certainty she had never felt before.